Cross-region operation radius shrinks, so why is the market still vast?

Driven by the national agricultural machinery purchase subsidy policy, amid the growing shortage of rural labor and the continuous expansion of agricultural operation scale, in the past two years local combine harvesters in China's main wheat-producing areas have become increasingly sufficient and large wheat combine harvesters have kept increasing; operation efficiency has accelerated, the time gap has narrowed, and this has led the cross-region operation market radius to show a shrinking trend. “In the 2011 summer harvest, all 15 townships in the county set up reception points along the roads, receiving more than 1,000 cross-region operators in total. In 2014, the township reception points were no longer set up, and the 3 reception stations of the agricultural machinery department received only just over 100 operators; this year the figure is estimated not to exceed that number either.” said Huang Shuchun, head of the agricultural machinery supervision station of Wuhe County, Bengbu City, Anhui Province.

So, does the shrinking trend in the cross-region operation market radius mean that the cross-region operation market is shrinking along with it?

During this year's wheat harvest, of the 150,000 mu of wheat of the Taishengkang Grain Planting Cooperative in Shen County, Shandong Province, only 50,000 mu was harvested by the cooperative's large combine harvesters because of insufficient agricultural machinery. For the remaining 100,000 mu, the cooperative gave members a 5 yuan fertilizer purchase voucher per mu and asked them to contact the mobile harvesters in society on their own for the operation. This is truly puzzling: with 150,000 mu of land, the operation scale is quite large. By common sense, the cooperative should vigorously purchase combine harvesters to guarantee production needs and lower production costs.

“Insufficient combine harvesters will delay the harvest, but too many harvesters will tie up excessive funds, and the long idleness of agricultural machinery after the wheat harvest will cause a waste of resources.” Pang Xuechang, the person in charge of agricultural machinery at the Taishengkang Grain Planting Cooperative, pointed out where the problem lies. Moreover, combine harvesters depreciate too quickly: after a harvester is used for three years, even at 20,000 it is unwanted when resold. And as the service life of the harvester increases, maintenance and repair costs grow higher and higher, which in turn becomes a burden on the cooperative. These have become the key factors constraining the cooperative from further vigorously purchasing combine harvesters.

Even with the advantage of large-scale agricultural operation, the comparative returns from farmers working the land are still relatively low, and farmers will not blindly invest in combine harvesters. So every year during the summer harvest season, the out-of-town combine harvesters moving from south to north will still be the best supplementary force for the local wheat harvest market; this is an important way to achieve maximum utilization of agricultural machinery resources. “I spend most of the year working outside. In March and April I first go to Hainan to harvest rice, then go to Henan, Anhui and my hometown to harvest wheat. In August I go to Hainan again to harvest rice, and then head north all the way, harvesting rice as far as Heilongjiang along the route.” said Yu Pengfei, an agricultural machinery operator in Fangshan Town, Donghai County, Jiangsu Province.

According to statistics, this year during the “three summers”, 560,000 combine harvesters were put into use across all regions, and the harvesters participating in cross-region machine harvesting reached 300,000, accounting for 54% of the total machines used, basically flat compared with last year. It can thus be seen that the cross-region operation market remains vast. With the improvement in the level of informationization of the summer harvest and agricultural machinery cooperatives becoming the main force in “three summers” production, the degree of organization of cross-region operations will gradually increase in the future, blindly going out as individual machines will become increasingly rare, and the cross-region operation market will become more standardized and orderly.